This invention relates to devices for securing boats and ships to moorings, and more particularly to a device which allows the user to secure multiple lines from the mooring to the boat or ship.
Many persons who have boats or ships tie them up to a mooring near shore or in a harbor. A mooring is a floating device anchored to the shore or bottom of the harbor. A mooring is intended to secure the boat or ship so that the boater is not required to launch and remove a boat or ship from land and water each time it is used.
In areas where there can be storms or rough seas, boaters many times use more than one line to secure the boat or ship to the mooring. The use of multiple lines can help secure the boat to the mooring so that strong winds and waves do not tear the boat from the mooring often having catastrophic effects and many times resulting in the entire loss of the boat or ship. Multiple line attachment methods suffer from some significant disadvantages.
The background art shows that attaching a boat, ship or vehicle to a mooring was either done with a single line or with redundant lines. A common method for redundant lines was accomplished by placing the multiple lines on a common ring of the mooring. The lines are attached to a thimble and this thimble is then attached to the ring or chain of the mooring. There are significant disadvantages to the method shown in the background art.
This background art method causes interference or cross over of the thimbles and can cause excess abrasion of the lines often leading to premature failure from abrasion of the thimbles, lines or both.
The method shown in the background art does not allow for the even distribution of load between the lines. In order to get even loading of the lines they would need to have the same distance between the ring on the mooring and where they are tied off on the boat, or ship. This is extremely difficult to do, to get a common line distance. This is due to the rolling of the boat or ship relative to the mooring. Because the ship or boat is rolling in the water, the line distances are rarely the same resulting in uneven loading of the lines between the mooring and the boat or ship.
When the thimbles from, for example three lines, are attached to the ring on the mooring, they rest next to each other. Because the ring on the mooring is generally on the top of the mooring, the thimbles are not the same distance from the boat or ship. This also contributes to the unequal length of the mooring ropes shown in the background art.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for a bridal plate that can hold redundant mooring lines from a mooring.